Inside, however,
things are kept simple. Shiozawa prepares the ceramic
bowls and adjusts a flower in its vase, just so. This is
a time to focus not on the hurly-burly beyond these walls
but on tasks immediately at hand. Everything, after all,
must be precisely in order for the guests coming to tea.

Remove your shoes,
forget your everyday worries and step into the otherworld
of sado -- the Way of Tea -- where a steaming
bowl of frothy green matcha represents far more
than mere refreshment. Serious students of this ancient
art spend their lives striving to perfect a ritual that
some see as a path to spiritual transcendence.

"Doing the same
routine over and over, always paying attention to detail,
you understand your own mind better by the day,"
explains 69-year-old Shiozawa, who has been practicing
sado for more than five decades. "It's a lifelong
study."

Tea ceremony is one
of Japan's most important cultural institutions, a system
of choreographed movement and actions designed -- like
India's yoga and the Chinese martial art tai chi -- to
impart on its practitioners a sense of wholeness and
calm. Its centuries-old notion that the tearoom, like the
mind, should be an uncluttered space has influenced
almost every other form of Japanese creative expression,
from architecture to haiku.

Though once
practiced mainly by the leisured classes, tea ceremony is
far from being a leisure activity. As well as
encompassing elements of esoteric belief, it also
embodies a strict code of ethics -- a guideline for
personal bearing and social interaction that today boasts
more than 3 million followers in Japan and the rest of
the world. The vast majority of practitioners in Japan
are female.

"The trickling
sound of tea water fills me with a great silence deep
down inside," said Tokyo office employee Minako
Tahira, 30, who has practiced sado for six months
"to balance work with enjoyment." "But
there's more to it than that. I also want to find a place
for Japanese tradition in my life."

Measured routine

It takes decades to
master the countless forms of tea ceremony, some of them
so complex that they are performed only by the
highest-ranked tea-school officials. However, even a
novice attending an hourlong practice session can feel
something of its rapture.

The uninitiated are advised to stretch
their legs first, as the five or so guests are obliged to
sit in seiza (on folded knees), a position many
people find uncomfortable if not downright painful. They
may find some consolation, though, in the traditional omogashi
sweets -- often in hues suggestive of the season --
offered before tea.

With the reverence
of a nun, the hostess makes her entrance in the doorway.
She approaches the water kettle and, having also assumed
the seiza position, removes a cloth from her belt and
folds it so methodically that it seems she is searching
for imperfections in the weave. She wipes the cloth over
a jar containing the powdered green tea, carefully scoops
a few heaps into her bowl, ladles in hot water and then,
with a pear-shaped whisk, whips the concoction into a
bubbly lather. The bowl is placed on the tatami with the
decorative pattern gracing its side facing the guest.

The first guest,
following a similarly measured routine, walks -- or, if
space is limited, crawls -- to fetch the bowl. Bowing to
the others present, she holds the bowl slightly aloft as
a sign of thanks, turns its decorative pattern away from
herself in two measured mini-rotations, and brings the
rim to her lips to drink.

This is perhaps the
most sublime moment. The slightly bitter tea mingles with
the sweet aftertaste of omogashi before warming the body
on the way down. As the guest tips the bowl to her mouth
the bottom fills her field of vision with a slow cascade
of green froth. It is stress-therapy at work: Any tension
the guest may have brought vanishes with the bubbles.

"Served with a
respectful heart and received with gratitude, a bowl of
tea satisfies both physical and spiritual thirst,"
Soshitsu Sen XV, grand master of the Urasenke school of
tea ceremony -- the country's largest -- recently wrote.

If it sounds like religion,
that's because in some respects it is. Though most forms
of tea ceremony do not involve any particular form of
worship (some do include offerings to the Buddha or to
Shinto deities), it nevertheless borrows philosophical
concepts from Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Some
authorities even believe the use of the cloth may have
been inspired by the pall that covers the chalice in the
Mass introduced by early Roman Catholic missionaries from
the West.

Jennifer L.
Anderson, a Stanford University anthropologist and
tea-ceremony devotee, wrote in her 1991 book "An
Introduction to Japanese Tea Ritual" that many
followers are attracted to the repetitive, formal nature
of the tea ceremony because it assures them that the
universe has maintained its " 'correct' order"
-- a reflection of Confucian thought. Meanwhile, mystical
symbolism in the ceremony allows participants to draw
elements of the cosmic into their own lives. As an
example, Anderson cites the use of fire, water, wood,
metal and earth -- the five elements of Taoism --
throughout the ritual.

Everlasting life

Rather than focus on
any external sacred realm, however, some votaries of the
Way of Tea pursue the sudden, inner transformation known
in Buddhist philosophy as satori -- enlightenment.
For this reason, the ritual has long occupied a central
position in Zen.

Most comprehensible
to outsiders, perhaps, is sado's attention to seasonal
changes -- the budding of new leaves in the spring or
their withering in the autumn -- which followers say
helps them accept their own mortality as a natural part
of life.

"It teaches us how to
live and it teaches us how to die. To die
beautifully," said Urasenke representative Takeya
Yamasaki.

Tea-drinking was
closely associated with spiritual life long before it
ever came to Japan. Sometime midway through the first
millennium, the belief arose among Taoist scholars in
China that potions with tea as an ingredient could bring
everlasting life, and monks began incorporating it into
Buddhist ritual. After being brought from China by monks
and priests, the elixir debuted centerstage in Japan in
729, when Emperor Shomu invited 100 monks to share the
beverage at his palace.

For centuries after
that, tea was primarily consumed by monks who wanted help
staying awake during grueling meditation sessions. Common
folk rarely had access to the delicacy, though one
13th-century holy man, the priest Eison, did give it to
sick villagers as a health tonic.

In the following
centuries, the elite, bored with their lives in the court
and desperate for novel forms of entertainment, threw
parties where attendants competed for expensive prizes by
guessing the origin of tea samples. A depiction of the
Buddha or other religious imagery was often on display,
but otherwise these were very secular affairs.

It was all getting
too worldly, decided Zen monks. They began exhorting sado
disciples to use their study as a means of keeping
swelled egos in check rather than an excuse to show off
erudition. One avid follower of this minimalist approach
to tea was a 16th-century aficionado named Sen Soeki
Rikyu -- today better known as Sen no Rikyu, the most
influential figure in the history of the tea ceremony.

Rikyu, born into a
powerful merchant family in 1522, studied sado as a young
man and, impressing top masters of the art with his
innate talent, quickly rose to fame. Due to both his
pedigree and his skill, he was appointed as tea master to
two shogun, Oda Nobunaga and his successor, Toyotomi
Hideyoshi, both credited with putting Japan on the road
to nationhood. A warrior, Hideyoshi nevertheless took his
tea very seriously: During battles, he is said to have
performed the ceremony in plain view of his enemies to
awe them with his calm.

Rikyu exploited his
position under Hideyoshi to create a standardized
national system of tea ceremony based on the principles
of his Zen role models. His campaign included quiet, but
risky, opposition to the severe class-segregation of the
times. Many of Rikyu's samurai guests surely grumbled on
being asked to remove their swords and then having to
crouch to get through the tiny nijiriguchi tearoom
entryways -- requirements designed to humble haughty
visitors from the ruling strata. There is speculation
that the policy may have played a role in Hideyoshi's
demand, in 1591, that Rikyu commit seppuku (ritual
disembowelment) -- an event whose true circumstances
largely remain a mystery.

Today, Rikyu's
spiritual descendants, as heads of Japan's three main
schools of tea ceremony (which also include Omotesenke
and Mushanokojisenke), are still the guiding force in the
world of sado. And the challenge to keep alive their
famous ancestor's legacy is greater than ever.

For one, tea has
coffee to compete with, since meeting at Starbuck's for a
caffe latte is considered far more chic than
enduring the seiza position for a bowl of matcha. And
generations raised on action movies and Nintendo
generally don't have the patience for anything as subtle
as tea ceremony.

"Turning the
bowl a set number of times and all that, the whole thing
is such a formal pain in the butt," scoffs 18-year-old
college student Hitomi, interviewed as she emerged from a
video-game parlor in a Tokyo suburb. Her girlfriend
Shiori, also 18, nods in agreement. "I tried tea
ceremony once when I was in junior high school, but only
because I knew they'd serve sweets. It wasn't fun, so I
quit."

Tea for the times

But a freshened-up
look may now be giving the ancient art of sado what it
needs to face-off with flashier pastimes. For example,
the angled exteriors of up-and-coming designer Kimiko
Nakamura's stainless-steel sado vessels are evocative of
ultra-modern architecture. And trendsetting old Rikyu --
who is said to have used earthy, rough-hewn bowls --
would perhaps be pleasantly surprised if he were to see
people today drinking from an ice-like glass vessel
crafted by Hiroshi Kojitani,
another designer experimenting with materials previously
alien to tea ceremony.

"Rikyu
understood eccentric things. I think he would've gone for
glass," chuckled Kojitani, 64. People today are no
less open-minded, he said. "Japanese realize that
change is necessary."

Changing, too, is
the profile of tea ceremony's following. During the early
decades of the Showa Era (1926-89), the once
male-dominated ritual became the domain of women, who
were required to study it as a prerequisite for marriage.
The women's liberation movement subsequently left tea
ceremony with a reputation as an old-fashioned hobby for
elderly women. Now, however, growing numbers of working
women manage to fit tea ceremony between corporate
meetings. And, Urasenke school's Yamasaki says, males --
mostly businessmen -- now appear to be returning to the
tradition as well.

No matter their
gender, new adherents seem to be looking for the same
thing: a way of coping with the uncertainties and frantic
pace of 21st-century life. And the way things are going
out there, says Yamasaki, demand for the calm, formal
certitudes of the tea ceremony can only rise.

"When Sen no
Rikyu was alive, the country was plagued by war. Well,
it's war out there today, too. There's competition
between corporations, competition between workers . . .
Japanese don't have time to breathe." He pauses.
"People are coming to tea ceremony to get some peace
of mind."